Donald Trump‘s biggest worry continues to be Joe Biden, and the president went out of his way to slam him during his recent visit to Pennsylvania. Even going so far as to say that the former vice president abandoned the state, but he forgot to mention that his parents moved when Biden was a child. Plus Democrats are continuing to be divided about taking part in FOX News town halls which will only hurt those that choose to avoid it.

By avoiding FOX News, they only prove those viewers correct in feeling like Dems are always looking down on them. Elizabeth Warren is right on many things, but decrying other Democrats showing up on FOX News is a bad move. Why not move outside of the echo chamber and prove yourself to people who oppose you?

Joe Biden Donation King

Joe Biden is
finding unexpected online fundraising success from low-dollar donors, with more
than 97% of his contributions coming from those who gave less than $200, his
presidential campaign announced Tuesday.

The former vice president,
who last month raised $6.3 million in his first 24 hours as a
candidate, was widely expected to do well with conventional big-dollar
Democratic donors, who have lasting loyalty to President Barack Obama’s No. 2.
But it was an open question whether he’d be able to raise small amounts online
from the party’s base, a metric that is often touted as a demonstration of grassroots
support.

His campaign says the
newly released figures are a clear sign that he will be able to compete not
just with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of
Texas, whose online fundraising operations led the Democratic field last
quarter, but also with President Donald Trump.

“We’re continuing to build
a robust digital operation that brings new voters to Team Joe and puts our
campaign in a position of strength to take on Donald Trump,” said Biden digital
adviser Brandon English. “On Day One, a record-breaking 65,000 people found us
online and donated to Joe Biden. These are people we didn’t have email
addresses for 24 hours earlier.”

The campaign says nearly
two-thirds of Biden’s donors gave a total of less than $25, with teachers
comprising the largest professional block of contributors.

But while Biden’s campaign
is happy to talk about the percentage of donors who have given small
contributions over the internet, including 96,000 who gave during the first 24
hours of his campaign, they won’t say how much has been raised online.
Meanwhile, much of his recent campaign schedule has centered around high-dollar
donor events in Los Angeles and Florida.

Sanders, a prolific online
fundraiser, took in more than $15 million last quarter from those who gave less
than $200, including nearly $6 million collected from about 220,000 donors in
the 24 hours after launching his campaign. O’Rourke took in about $5.5 million
from donors who gave less than $200 during the first quarter, according to Federal
Election Commission records.

Many candidates in the
race have spent years building out their online fundraising operations, which
often target prospective donors through social media ads and emails that ask
for a small contribution.

Biden is a relative
newcomer, though he did have one major advantage: Obama’s email list. Another
likely factor is his nascent success in online ad spending that has outpaced
Trump $1.5 million to $969,000, according to spending data tabulated by the
digital firm Bully Pulpit Interactive.

“Every story until now has
been ‘Trump is outspending Democrats online,’ and it’s clear Biden and his team
understand that,” said Tim Lim, a Democratic digital strategist who worked for
Obama and Hillary Clinton. “They are putting their money where their mouth is.”

The campaign says their
biggest fundraising moment yet was during a Biden rally in Philadelphia on
Saturday, when they took in about $1,000 per minute.

Lim, however, said that
for all the talk about online fundraising, the most important numbers remain
how much cash you have and how quickly you’re spending it.

“There will be a lot of
spin about those metrics, but unless they are impacting your bottom line, they
don’t really matter,” he said.

FOX NEWS DEMOCRAT FIGHT 2020

Bernie
Sanders appeared on a Fox News town hall and attracted nearly 2.6 million
viewers. Elizabeth Warren turned down a similar chance while branding the
network a “hate-for-profit
racket.” Pete Buttigieg used Fox News’ own air to criticize two of its most
popular personalities.

Whether to appear on the
nation’s top-rated cable news channel has become an unlikely marker for the
divergent strategies top Democrats vying for the White House are employing.
They are seeking to deny a second term to one of Fox News Channel’s most avid
viewers, President Donald Trump.

It’s forcing them to weigh
the possibility of extended airtime in front of conservative audiences who
could be impressed against possibly alienating some of their own party’s
primary voters, who don’t want to encourage what they see as the network’s
overly sympathetic relationship to the Trump administration and other
Republican causes.

“It is very tough to win
an American election and concede blue-collar, middle-class votes. And they
don’t watch MSNBC,” said Rory McShane, a Las Vegas-based Republican strategist,
referring to the cable network whose star commentators are left-of-center.
“They watch Fox News.”

Complicating
matters is the Democratic National Committee’s decision in March to bar Fox
News from hosting one of the party’s 2020 presidential primary debates, with
DNC Chairman Tom Perez saying the network isn’t “fair and neutral enough” to do
so.

Still, enough Democrats
have refused to shun the network that even Trump has taken notice.

“What’s going on with Fox,
by the way? What’s going on there? They’re putting more Democrats on than you
have Republicans,” Trump said Monday at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
“Something strange is going on at Fox, folks.”

Sanders, a senator from
Vermont, drew his largest TV town hall audience of the primary season when he
appeared on Fox News last month. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar did her own town
hall on the channel and is a frequent Fox News guest, saying it boosts her
credentials with voters from both parties. Kirsten Gillibrand will have a Fox
News town hall on June 2, which her campaign says reinforces the New York
senator’s “taking on the tough fights and winning in red and purple places.”

Former Texas Rep. Beto
O’Rourke, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and former Obama administration housing
chief Julian Castro all say they’d be willing to do similar town halls, though
a Fox News spokeswoman declined to comment on ongoing conversations about
possible town halls with any candidates.

In declining her own town
hall invitation, Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, tweeted, “Fox News is a
hate-for-profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists —
it’s designed to turn us against each other, risking life and death
consequences.”

Sen. Kamala Harris of
California also isn’t interested in doing a Fox News town hall. And others have
faced backlash for not flatly refusing to do one.

“I understand the
short-term incentives for Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg to appear on Fox
News, but putting an imprimatur of legitimacy on one of the most destructive
forces in American politics has long-term consequences,” Dan Pfeiffer, once a
senior adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted last month.

But Warren’s decision was
panned by Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of ABC’s “The View,” a program where
Democratic presidential hopefuls have lined up to appear for its large,
presumably bipartisan, daytime viewership.

Joe Brettell, a
Texas-based public relations consultant and media strategist, said “both Harris
and Warren were playing to the crowd to a certain extent.”

“But the reality of it is,
the rule of thumb for any candidate in this day and age should be to actively
and genuinely engage with the media to drive their message,” Brettell said.
“Because the half-life of a memorable quip or a solid quote or a good moment is
endlessly reverberated on social media.”

Buttigieg, the mayor of
South Bend, Indiana, acknowledged Democrats’ Fox News divide during Sunday’s
appearance, which drew an average of 1.1 million viewers, saying, “A lot of
folks in my party were critical of me for even doing this.”

He added, “I get where
that’s coming from,” then blasted network personalities Tucker Carlson and
Laura Ingraham for their views on immigration.

Fox & Friends co-host
Brian Kilmeade bristled at that, saying Monday on-air, “Don’t hop on our channel and continue to put
down the other hosts on the channel, or the channel.”

“If you feel that negative
about it, don’t come,” Kilmeade said.

Trump himself complained
that the mayor had appeared on the network “knocking the hell out of Fox.”

Buttigieg fundraised off
his decision to appear, writing in an email to supporters, “If we ignore the
viewers of Fox News and every news platform that doesn’t share our worldview,
we will surrender our ability to speak directly to millions of American
voters.”

McShane, the GOP consultant, said he agrees with that sentiment — if not most of the rest of
what Democratic presidential hopefuls say.

“You can be Elizabeth
Warren and rally all the Zabar’s-eating, Starbucks-drinking, associate professors,”
he said of food chains based in New York and Seattle. “But most of the rest of
the country thinks those people are whack-a-doo.”

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